4x25-Gb/s 40-km PHY at 1310 nm for 100 GbE using SOA-Based Preamplifier

We present extensive numerical simulations of an optical link deploying four electro-absorption modulated lasers (EMLs) at 25 Gb/s over up to 40 km of standard single-mode fiber. The receiver comprises a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) as a pre-amplifier. We analyze the bit error ratio (BER) along different link lengths under varying conditions such as output power and extinction ratio of the EML transmitters, noise figure of the SOA pre-amplifier and the bit and word alignment of the four wavelength channels. 

We demonstrate that the EML transmitters require a minimum extinction ratio of 8 to 10 dB and a minimum output power of +2 to +4 dBm in order to meet the BER requirements for 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE) using 4x25-Gb/s Physical Media Dependent (PMD) devices. Furthermore, we show that single-channel performance analyses can be used to estimate the behavior for multi-channel amplification in the SOA pre-amplifier.